Photo by Jennifer S. Altman/for The Times (Jennifer S. Altman/ For The Times)

HEATH LEDGER’S arrival in Hollywood gave little indication he would become a transformational actor whose short career would leave such an indelible impression. Tall, blond and surf-buffed, just barely out of boyhood but already a TV star at home, Ledger hitched a ride from Australia on the arm of an alluring older woman and quickly made his big-screen debut at 19 as the bad-boy heartthrob in 1999’s “Ten Things I Hate About You.”

The role was catnip for commodification, a potential trap that in less searching hands could have consigned Ledger to a career as the pot of gold at the end of every rom-com rainbow Hollywood plotted over the next decade.

By the time of his abrupt departure, though, Ledger was something else entirely. His Oscar-winning performance as the Joker in ”The Dark Knight” not only set a new template for villainy (Steve-Bannon-as-the-Joker is the new Dick-Cheney-as-Darth-Vader), but also managed to personify our social disorders in a way that captured the paranoid zeitgeist of 2008.

Similarly iconic was his turn just a few years before as cowboy Ennis Del Mar in “Brokeback Mountain,” through which Ledger offered up an allegory for the minefields of hyper-masculinity at just the right time.

When Ledger died at age 28 on Jan. 22, 2008, from a fatal overdose of prescription pills, the loss was compounded by the sense that a potentially generational figure was just hitting his stride. For family, friends and fans, Ledger exited too soon and without fair warning. Those nearest to him closed ranks in the lurid aftermath of his overdose. A filmic reckoning with his death and the questions of what might have been has been a bit of unfinished business for nearly a decade now. …

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